In the opening scenes, in Tallinn, an old man with a white beard and his young niece are looking at a red bicycle as a possible Christmas gift. The girl says she doesn’t want red but wants to wait and get a blue bicycle instead. The old man says that nothing is certain in life and Christmas is a long time away. Maybe she will get it, and maybe she won’t.
The bicycle shopkeeper makes a phone call. A white van stops in front of a Danish train station where a blue bicycle is chained to a post. Two hooded men get out, cut the chain, put the bicycle into the van, and drive away.
Markus is a soldier in Afghanistan. He calls his wife, Emma, who says that their daughter Mathilde’s bicycle was stolen at the train station and now the family car won’t start. Emma and Mathilde walk to the train station.
Otto and Lennart are at work presenting a worthless algorithm that they claim can be used to predict future events. Otto says that all events are products of a series of preceding events, but because we often have insufficient data, we categorize events as coincidences. Their bosses aren’t impressed and fire them.
As Otto is riding the train home, he notices a tattooed man in the same car. Then he sees another man get up, throw a sandwich and drink in the trash, and exit the train. Mathilde and Emma get on the train. It is crowded, so Otto insists that Emma have his seat. The train then slams into another train which rakes the right side of the train car and kills Emma.
Markus returns home to console his grieving daughter. Mathilde and Markus find it difficult to come to terms with the tragedy, causing strain in their relationship. Mathilde thinks her father needs grief counseling, but he refuses.
Otto and Lennart approach Markus and inform him that the train accident wasn’t a coincidence but was a planned murder to eliminate a key witness (the tattooed man “Eagle”) who was about to give evidence against the head of the Riders of Justice motorcycle gang. Otto’s hacker friend Emmenthaler uses facial recognition software to identify the suspicious man who left the train seconds before the accident as an Egyptian from Cairo. Otto and Lennart make Emmenthaler lower the threshold of the facial recognition to 95 percent and look for matches with Danish addresses. The person with the highest percentage match in Denmark is Palle Olesen. Otto says he recognizes him from the train.